In-Call Apps with Tropo Connect

Hundreds of thousands of developers have launched millions of apps since we launched Tropo.com in 2009. Traditional Tropo apps involve a virtual phone number that users can call (or text) and interact with a Tropo app, or that app can call (or text) end users. Examples of traditional Tropo apps include two-factor authentication services, robo-dialers, survey apps, and conference call apps.

In-Call Apps takes a different approach, using existing phone numbers (instead of virtual numbers), opening up the full power of the telephone network and allowing developers to do all kinds of fancy things before, during and after a phone call is connected.

In-Call Apps are location aware and integrate nicely with your favorite API’s using JavaScript. For example, let’s say you’re sitting at home blasting some White Stripes on Spotify and your phone rings. A simple Tropo Connect app could 1) know that you’re home, 2) know that you’ve got an incoming phone call, and 3) know that you likely want to turn the volume down on your music in order to answer the phone. So before your phone even rings, the Tropo Connect app is already lowering your volume.

Another example could be a Tropo Connect application that is connected to the Salesforce.com API. One of your important clients calls your cell phone to place an order. A Tropo Connect app could hit the Salesforce API, recognize the caller ID as one of your clients, record the call, attach the recording to a “To-do” item in Salesforce and you didn’t even have to walk off the green.

Internet of Things (IoT) with Tropo Connect

When paired with the new wave of IoT consumer devices that have recently been taking the world by storm, Tropo Connect becomes a powerful tool to automate your home or business. Because Tropo Connect apps are location aware, you can turn on your lights automatically when you arrive home, or connect with your smart thermostat to save money when you are away from home. Or even lock your doors from down the block. The options are only limited to your imagination.

Making Money with Tropo Connect

Tropo Connect is completely free for developers. When you’re ready to launch your Tropo Connect app to the world, just let us know because we’d love to help you monetize it.

Sign up for the Tropo Connect Beta

The Tropo Connect Beta is open for existing Tropo Developers. You can sign up to join the beta today at http://tropo.com/connect

]]>https://www.tropo.com/2015/02/announcing-tropo-connect/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=announcing-tropo-connectAnnouncing Ito, the Communication Assistant for Slackhttp://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/3uvzCKI_zE0/
<p>Some tenacious coding elves that work in the crawlspace under the Tropo offices have been busy click-clicking up a tasty new offering called Ito, which launched today in beta. What is Ito? Ito is a bot that works with Slack... <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com/2015/01/announcing-ito-communication-assistant-slack/" class="more-link" title="Read Announcing Ito, the Communication Assistant for Slack">Read more &#187;</a></p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com/2015/01/announcing-ito-communication-assistant-slack/">Announcing Ito, the Communication Assistant for Slack</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com">Tropo</a>.</p>https://www.tropo.com/?p=8119Thu, 15 Jan 2015 23:17:00 +0000Some tenacious coding elves that work in the crawlspace under the Tropo offices have been busy click-clicking up a tasty new offering called Ito, which launched today in beta.

What is Ito?

Ito is a bot that works with Slack to make it excruciatingly easy to spin up voice and video conferences directly from your Slack chat rooms. The Ito bot adds voice and video features, including person-to-person calling, multi-party conferencing, call recording, voice to text transcription, and voice analytics to text messaging platforms. Users give Ito commands via a simple chat-based interface.

How does it Work?

Ito gets triggered in any Slack chatroom through simple commands typed right in the Slack interface. You just type to Ito what you want and the bot connects you. Here are some examples:

/ito @johnyaya — Ito will call you and Slack user “johnyaya” and connect both of you.

/ito all — Ito would call and connect all of the Slack users in the Slack Channel or Private Group you type the command into.

/ito @johnyaya 14085551212 — Ito will call and connect @johnyaya and the phone at 14085551212

/ito 14085551212 +14075551212 1-415-555-1212 — Ito will call and connect you with these three phone numbers.

/ito sip:johnyaya@yoyodyne.com — Ito will connect you and John Yaya at John’s SIP address.

But wait, there’s more!

Once you connect your calls, Ito can do more things like record the conference call, perform Hypervoice voice analytics including speech-to-text transcription and more. Future plans include support other popular collaborative messenging tool like IRC and HipChat.

How do I sign up?

Ito is currently available for a invite-only beta. You can register to participate in the beta and find out more information at at http://i.to

]]>https://www.tropo.com/2015/01/announcing-ito-communication-assistant-slack/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=announcing-ito-communication-assistant-slackSaving lives with IOT wearables and Tropohttp://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/xTCbrMKe6dk/
<p>This past weekend at the AT&#38;T Developer Summit Hackathon, over 900 developers ascended on the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas to build apps utilizing the latest technologies and win some of the more than $100,000 in cash and prizes.... <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com/2015/01/saving-lives-iot-wearables-tropo/" class="more-link" title="Read Saving lives with IOT wearables and Tropo">Read more &#187;</a></p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com/2015/01/saving-lives-iot-wearables-tropo/">Saving lives with IOT wearables and Tropo</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com">Tropo</a>.</p>https://www.tropo.com/?p=8100Wed, 07 Jan 2015 21:27:45 +0000This past weekend at the AT&T Developer Summit Hackathon, over 900 developers ascended on the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas to build apps utilizing the latest technologies and win some of the more than $100,000 in cash and prizes.

One of the teams, led by Octoblu co-founder, Chris Matthieu, built a very cool app that has the potential to save lives by shaving off critical minutes in life-threatening medical situations. While the app has many more potential practical applications, Chris and the team did a great job of combining several technologies for their “Uber for EMT’s” and “Nursery of Things” apps, both of which use Internet of Things technologies. The team ended up winning the Sensoria Devices – Sensoria Integration Challenge for their efforts.

Uber for EMTs uses accelerometer data from wearable sensors provided by Sensoria to detect dramatic acceleration changes by the user (such as a fall or bicycle accident). Leveraging Octoblu’s Internet of Things platform, the sensor triggers a Tropo-powered voice phone call to the potentially injured party and asks, using speech recognition, if the person is ok. If they say no, it automatically triggers a series of events to geo-locate them, find the nearest Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) and sends the EMT Esri-powered map data to direct them to the patient, thus eliminating the need for an emergency dispatcher and potentially shaving off critical minutes in medical response times.

Tropo’s Adam Kalsey, director of Tropo Academy, gave one of the keynote presentations, outlining the role of cloud computing in telcom service innovation, vastly reducing assessment, development and deployment of new services for operators. Here’s a video of Adam‘s presentation:

]]>https://www.tropo.com/2014/11/post-tadsummit-2014-round-up/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=post-tadsummit-2014-round-upTropo is a proud sponsor of TADSummit 2014, Istanbulhttp://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/lxcjRwyn2RU/
<p>After an exciting TADHack in Madrid, Tropo is looking forward to the upcoming TADSummit in November 12-13, 2014 in Istanbul, Turkey. TADSummit (TADS) is focused on building an essential yet missing component of the Telecom Industry, a true telecom application developer ecosystem that creates new... <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com/2014/11/tropo-proud-sponsor-tadsummit-2014-istanbul/" class="more-link" title="Read Tropo is a proud sponsor of TADSummit 2014, Istanbul">Read more &#187;</a></p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com/2014/11/tropo-proud-sponsor-tadsummit-2014-istanbul/">Tropo is a proud sponsor of TADSummit 2014, Istanbul</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com">Tropo</a>.</p>https://www.tropo.com/?p=8087Thu, 06 Nov 2014 14:34:30 +0000After an exciting TADHack in Madrid, Tropo is looking forward to the upcoming TADSummit in November 12-13, 2014 in Istanbul, Turkey.

TADSummit (TADS) is focused on building an essential yet missing component of the Telecom Industry, a true telecom application developer ecosystem that creates new services and customer value to address the revenue decline from the commoditization of voice and messaging.

The scope is across legacy services, telecom APIs, WebRTC, IMS, communications service platforms, cloud communications, and many other web and IT-centric service platforms. There will be deep dive work streams focused on solving critical service innovation challenges in building the TAD Ecosystem

Its a great opportunity to meet the brightest minds in the communications industry and have one-on-one discussions with them, so join us in Istanbul (not Constantinople!)

]]>https://www.tropo.com/2014/11/tropo-proud-sponsor-tadsummit-2014-istanbul/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tropo-proud-sponsor-tadsummit-2014-istanbulIntroducing the Amdocs Network Cloud Service Orchestratorhttp://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/XfhjRWLhIHw/
<p>Tropo has partnered with Amdocs to pre-integrate Tropo with the new Amdocs Network Cloud Services Orchestrator, allowing any service provider to quickly launch their own private cloud instance of the Tropo Platform, giving large enterprises and subscribers seamless access to... <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com/2014/10/introducing-amdocs-cloud-service-orchestrator/" class="more-link" title="Read Introducing the Amdocs Network Cloud Service Orchestrator">Read more &#187;</a></p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com/2014/10/introducing-amdocs-cloud-service-orchestrator/">Introducing the Amdocs Network Cloud Service Orchestrator</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com">Tropo</a>.</p>https://www.tropo.com/?p=8082Fri, 31 Oct 2014 15:03:33 +0000Tropo has partnered with Amdocs to pre-integrate Tropo with the new Amdocs Network Cloud Services Orchestrator, allowing any service provider to quickly launch their own private cloud instance of the Tropo Platform, giving large enterprises and subscribers seamless access to Tropo’s APIs and robust suite of in-call apps including: Salesforce.com integration, mobile call recording, web calling and in-call personal assistants.

The service provided by Amdocs is their new Network Cloud Service Orchestrator, which allows telcos, mobile operators and service providers to quickly spin up virtual instances of Tropo and complementary services with ease, allowing new features such as call recording to be offered to subscribers without deploying any new equipment. Additional use cases are available on the Amdocs website.

In addition to Tropo, Amdocs recently announced over 20 partners in the NFV Services Partner Program, including Juniper Networks, Cloudify, RedHat, Dell and Metaswitch.

]]>https://www.tropo.com/2014/10/introducing-amdocs-cloud-service-orchestrator/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=introducing-amdocs-cloud-service-orchestratorTropo Wins Innovation Accelerator Awardhttp://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/WPu656ajpx0/
<p>Last week in Singapore, Tropo was chosen as the winner of the Innovation Accelerator award during the LTE Asia Conference. Now in its 9th year, the LTE Asia Conference brings together over 1000+ high-level attendees (60%+ of whom will be representing operators)... <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com/2014/10/tropo-wins-innovation-accelerator-award/" class="more-link" title="Read Tropo Wins Innovation Accelerator Award">Read more &#187;</a></p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com/2014/10/tropo-wins-innovation-accelerator-award/">Tropo Wins Innovation Accelerator Award</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com">Tropo</a>.</p>https://www.tropo.com/?p=8079Thu, 09 Oct 2014 16:34:09 +0000
Last week in Singapore, Tropo was chosen as the winner of the Innovation Accelerator award during the LTE Asia Conference. Now in its 9th year, the LTE Asia Conference brings together over 1000+ high-level attendees(60%+ of whom will be representing operators) from 50+ countries across the APAC region and beyond , bringing together the ecosystem to discuss a wide range of issues including monetzing LTE, hetnets, network optimization, LTE evolution, 5G and more.

This was the first year the event included an awards ceremony and we’re extremely excited to have won the Innovation Accelerator Award, specifically in response to our work with APAC partners China Telecom and Globe Philippines, both who have rolled out Tropo to their ecosystem partners.

LTE World Series Blogger Benny Har-Even caught up with Tropo’s APAC General Manager, Fuxin Jiao-Kiuru shortly after the award was announced and put together this inteview:

]]>https://www.tropo.com/2014/10/tropo-wins-innovation-accelerator-award/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tropo-wins-innovation-accelerator-awardLast Week’s System Outage (9/2 & 9/3)http://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/gu-_ZZLX9Rg/
<p>As most of our users are aware at this point, on Tuesday 9/2 and Wednesday 9/3 we saw several system impacting events that caused inbound and outbound voice and SMS traffic to fail for short periods of time. The root... <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com/2014/09/last-weeks-system-outage-92-93/" class="more-link" title="Read Last Week&#8217;s System Outage (9/2 &#038; 9/3)">Read more &#187;</a></p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com/2014/09/last-weeks-system-outage-92-93/">Last Week&#8217;s System Outage (9/2 &#038; 9/3)</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com">Tropo</a>.</p>https://www.tropo.com/?p=8067Mon, 08 Sep 2014 15:41:32 +0000As most of our users are aware at this point, on Tuesday 9/2 and Wednesday 9/3 we saw several system impacting events that caused inbound and outbound voice and SMS traffic to fail for short periods of time. The root cause was difficult to locate and resolve, resulting in nearly 48 hours of continuous troubleshooting by the Operations and Engineering teams, but finally as of late night EST on 9/3 we believe it’s understood and resolved. Since these events impacted our customers in a significant way, we wanted to provide a detailed explanation as a post mortem – we’ll start with the cause:

Tropo uses DNS as a distributed key value store for server routing, discovery, and application lookups, and we began the process of moving this data into their own domain on 9/2. The first step of this process was to deploy the new domain into our DNS servers. Since Tropo maintains two facilities for voice traffic (Orlando and Las Vegas), and the LAS facility was not in routing, we deployed the zones to the slave there first. Once these slaves were deployed, they sent NOTIFY signals for all the zones to all the name servers, which triggered a series of AXFR (zone transfer) requests. Our zones are several gigabytes, and this increased load coupled with the older version of Bind deployed at the time, brought us to a critical point and caused unexpected high load on the entire DNS infrastructure. Since the version of Bind we were using does not support SMP (multiple cores), the load caused all requests to essentially fail in all sites; this stopped any and all internal voice traffic until the load subsided.

Steps taken to resolve:

Upgrade Bind to latest GA, which gets us multiprocessor support and improved efficiency managing large zones files

We sincerely apologize for the difficulties encountered and the traffic impacted; we put every effort into resolving this problem as quickly as we could, and are committed to complete transparency should anyone have any further questions. We value all of our developers and customers, and appreciate all of your patience and understanding throughout.

]]>Bloghttps://www.tropo.com/2014/09/last-weeks-system-outage-92-93/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=last-weeks-system-outage-92-93Customer Service and Metricshttp://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/9yHs5NR1NX4/
<p>This post is by Tropo’s Vice President of Customer Experience, Justin Dupree A very public call between a customer retention rep for Comcast and an AOL employee named Ryan Block is making the rounds, and it is indeed painful to... <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com/2014/07/customer-service-metrics/" class="more-link" title="Read Customer Service and Metrics">Read more &#187;</a></p><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com/2014/07/customer-service-metrics/">Customer Service and Metrics</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.tropo.com">Tropo</a>.</p>https://www.tropo.com/?p=8050Mon, 21 Jul 2014 14:49:59 +0000This post is by Tropo’s Vice President of Customer Experience, Justin Dupree

A very public call between a customer retention rep for Comcast and an AOL employee named Ryan Block is making the rounds, and it is indeed painful to listen to – its obvious there’s something personal riding on the retention of Mr. Block’s business, and it’s fueling the persistent insistence of the rep. To anyone who ever worked in a call center, it’ll be pretty clear what that driving force is – metrics.

A recent Reddit post from someone claiming to be a former Comcast employee – and I say claiming only because it’s Reddit and I have no way to verify – explains it pretty cleanly:

TXMadison: “In retention, the more products you save per customer the better you do, and the more products you disconnect the worst you do (if a customer with a triple play disconnects, you get hit as losing every one of those lines of business, not just losing one customer.) These guys fight tooth and nail to keep every customer because if they don’t meet their numbers they don’t get paid.”

That rep’s entire job is to keep someone from canceling, at all costs, without any actual regard for the caller. It is an entirely statistical situation, one applicable in a general sense to many large company support systems. The representative is judged by a quantitative value — number of customers successfully retained, calls taken in an hour, or how long a ticket takes to close – the actual value varies depending on department and product, but the end result is a judgment based on a number and little else.

Using quantitative values changes a very human interaction – someone who needs help and someone (ostensibly) there to provide that help – and makes it cold, like a spreadsheet column showing the number of starving children in a country far away. It’s consistently going to result in representatives that don’t care about solving the actual issue, only about what their metrics are going to show, and that’s frankly idiotic…and unfortunately extremely common.

I have worked in a support capacity for four companies since 1999, those with phone lines and those that functioned via email or chat, for various types of products and various kinds (and quantities) of customers. The first job I had was for a small division of a major corporation and it used metrics to determine performance – how many calls you took, how long you were on the call, how many tickets you solved.

The individuals who consistently performed best in the metrics were typically gaming the system, not solving the most problems, even going so far as hanging up on calls to pad their stats. The individuals who were consistently praised the most by the customers, on the other hand, were those who disregarded the metrics in general and did what was necessary to resolve the actual problem. I was one of the latter, and never wavered from the idea that to do my job to the best of my ability, I had to ensure the problem was fixed before I let go of the call. When the opportunity to develop and lead a support team arose, I knew I had to establish an entire support philosophy based on my previous experience – I had to avoid the pitfalls that result in abysmal customer service in companies the world over. As such, our support team at Tropo follows these four general guidelines:

• Take as much time as needed to resolve an issue
• Work on tickets as a team, not as isolated individuals
• Asking for help, including additional training, is always welcome and encouraged
• Support does not close a ticket without the customer confirming resolution

This approach establishes a strong relationship with our users, and ensures the support experience is consistently a positive one – even when a large or especially difficult problem arises. Unfortunately, many large companies frequently take a product first, customer support last approach; that only works if your product is absolutely flawless, forever. The moment a problem arises and your support infrastructure fails to deliver, it doesn’t matter that you provided the best product – all that matters is when your customer needed you, you weren’t there for them, and that’s what they’re going to remember.

The hackathon commenced after the keynotes, with 70+ teams working on different projects around the globe. On Saturday, the teams began their pitches, most of them recorded on video. All of the pitches can be viewed on the TADHack YouTube channel. Special congrats the Ideable team for their “Phone Medication Reminders for Elderly” hack and Dialogic’s Vincent Puglia for his myVirtualLesson demo. Check out both videos below:

]]>https://www.tropo.com/2014/06/post-tadhack-roundup/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=post-tadhack-roundupPhono now works with Firefox Mobilehttp://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/5G8sxAfCnHo/
Mozilla released a new Firefox Mobile for Android today. One of the big features is WebRTC support, making this the first mainstream mobile browser with WebRTC enabled by default. We&#8217;re quite proud to say that Phono 1.1 works out of the box with Firefox Mobile. No changes required on your end, and you can try [&#8230;]http://blog.phono.com/?p=669Tue, 17 Sep 2013 16:30:56 +0000Mozilla released a new Firefox Mobile for Android today. One of the big features is WebRTC support, making this the first mainstream mobile browser with WebRTC enabled by default. We’re quite proud to say that Phono 1.1 works out of the box with Firefox Mobile. No changes required on your end, and you can try it out on your Android device today. Install or update Firefox, then open one of your Phono applications or our Kitchen Sink demo tool.

Mobile communications made easy with Firefox and Phono.

]]>http://blog.phono.com/2013/09/17/phono-now-works-with-firefox-mobile/Phono, now with Firefox and Opushttp://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/1ySvGlFOJ68/
A couple of weeks ago we announced our inclusion of DTLS (even open sourcing it) and our promise to support WebRTC in Firefox when their WebRTC support was released. Today, Firefox 22 is being released, the first Firefox release with WebRTC built in by default. We&#8217;re happy to say that Phono 1.1, available starting today, [&#8230;]http://blog.phono.com/?p=653Tue, 25 Jun 2013 15:42:17 +0000A couple of weeks ago we announced our inclusion of DTLS (even open sourcing it) and our promise to support WebRTC in Firefox when their WebRTC support was released. Today, Firefox 22 is being released, the first Firefox release with WebRTC built in by default. We’re happy to say that Phono 1.1, available starting today, works with Firefox without plugins and also brings support for Opus to Phono.

Our leadership in WebRTC (we’re one of the editors of the WebRTC spec at the W3C) means that we’re able to be the first to bring new and emerging Real Time Communications technologies to you. The great news is that existing Phono applications don’t need to change in order to take advantage of these new changes. Simply include the Phono 1.1 SDK and your existing application will just work. For Web applications that use our CDN, that can be as simple as changing your URL to include “1.1″ like so: http://s.phono.com/releases/1.1/jquery.phono.min.js

Firefox support is awesome, but we’re not done there. We’ve also added support for the Opus codec. Audio junkies probably already know about Opus. For the rest of us, a codec is the mechanism that takes the audio you hear and puts it in bits and bytes. Codecs have limitations. Some are good for voice, some for music, some for high bandwidth connections, and some for low bandwidth. Many are encumbered by patents, meaning anyone using them has to pay royalties. Opus is an amazing codec. It’s an adaptive codec, and works in almost every situation, from low bandwidth to high, from music to telephone calls. Best of all, it’s open, and royalty free. Chances are, Opus is going to be a standard codec for WebRTC.

Other than Opus, DTLS, and Firefox support, Phono 1.1 contains a bunch of web browser compatibility improvements, audio fixes, and other under-the-hood improvements.

WebRTC is taking off for all sorts of applications. The quickly evolving standards mean that you could be constantly changing your app to keep up. Even after WebRTC is a completed standard, browsers always implement things in different ways, resulting in a need for significant testing and browser-specific code paths. We’re doing all that for you, so using Phono for your development means that you won’t need to keep up with or code for browser differences. Even if the browser doesn’t support WebRTC, Phono works through Flash, Java, iOS, and Android media plugins — automatically.

Voxeo Labs is committed to Phono providing the best development experience for real time communications applications, in any browser, on any platform, and without requiring complex changes for every platform. If you’re at the WebRTC Conference in Atlanta this week, stop by the Voxeo Labs booth and say hello.

]]>http://blog.phono.com/2013/06/25/phono-now-with-firefox-and-opus/Video: Building voice applications with Phono and PhoneGaphttp://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/Nir3BhhXPFk/
With Phono, you can build mobile voice and messaging applications for Android and iOS using HTML and Javascript and deploy them as native applications with PhoneGap. It&#8217;s the easiest way for a web developer to get started with mobile apps. Tim Panton, one of the developers of Phono, has recorded a couple of videos to [&#8230;]http://beta-blog.phono.com/?p=640Mon, 18 Feb 2013 09:54:25 +0000With Phono, you can build mobile voice and messaging applications for Android and iOS using HTML and Javascript and deploy them as native applications with PhoneGap. It’s the easiest way for a web developer to get started with mobile apps. Tim Panton, one of the developers of Phono, has recorded a couple of videos to walk you through getting started.

Building an iOS application:

Building an Android PhoneGap application:

Next, we’ll feature screencasts on how you can build mobile Phono apps without PhoneGap.

]]>http://blog.phono.com/2013/02/18/video-building-voice-applications-with-phono-and-phonegap/Video: Building native iOS applications with Phonohttp://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/4CT55hbBurk/
Earlier this week we showed you how to use PhoneGap and Phono together to create mobile communications apps with HTML. Today, Tim Panton demonstrates creating a fully-native iOS application with real-time communications built in using Phono&#8217;s new native iOS SDK.http://beta-blog.phono.com/?p=644Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:03:49 +0000Earlier this week we showed you how to use PhoneGap and Phono together to create mobile communications apps with HTML. Today, Tim Panton demonstrates creating a fully-native iOS application with real-time communications built in using Phono’s new native iOS SDK.

]]>http://blog.phono.com/2013/02/14/video-building-native-ios-applications-with-phono/Phono 0.6 is here with WebRTC!http://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/MaaGyop94Jc/
Today we&#8217;re announcing Phono 0.6, a significant release in the continuing evolution of Phono. 0.6 brings native iOS and Android components (no more PhoneGap required) and our first official release of WebRTC support. On the mobile side, we&#8217;ve added support for iOS on ARM7 devices and a Java SDK for building Android 3.0 and newer [&#8230;]http://beta-blog.phono.com/?p=636Tue, 05 Feb 2013 12:44:39 +0000Today we’re announcing Phono 0.6, a significant release in the continuing evolution of Phono. 0.6 brings native iOS and Android components (no more PhoneGap required) and our first official release of WebRTC support.

On the mobile side, we’ve added support for iOS on ARM7 devices and a Java SDK for building Android 3.0 and newer applications. Of course, if you still would like to use PhoneGap (we think it’s one of the easiest ways to build mobile apps), you certainly can.

The WebRTC spec isn’t finalized yet, so browser support is changing rapidly. At the moment, you can use WebRTC in Google Chrome 22, 23, or 24. As the spec evolves and new browsers start offeringWebRTC, future releases will support those as well.

To use Phono 0.6 in your existing Phono web application, if you’re serving the Phono files from our servers, simply change 0.5 to 0.6 in your URL and use http://s.phono.com/releases/0.6/jquery.phono.js

Over the next few days we’ll be publishing some videos on how to work with various aspects of Phono. First up is how to build a communications application with no plugins using WebRTC.

]]>Uncategorizedhttp://blog.phono.com/2013/02/05/phono-0-6-is-here-with-webrtc/New Release – PhonoSDK 0.4http://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/ZDO8ffIHIOE/
We&#8217;re pleased to announce the availability PhonoSDK 0.4. This is largely a bugfix release with some much anticipated performance improvements. Most notably, we added support for Adobe’s fancy RTMFP protocol which offers reduced latency and an acoustic echo canceler (yay!). No code changes are required to use the new stack. Just switch to v0.4 and [&#8230;]http://blog.phono.com/?p=620Thu, 19 Jul 2012 15:03:06 +0000We’re pleased to announce the availability PhonoSDK 0.4. This is largely a bugfix release with some much anticipated performance improvements. Most notably, we added support for Adobe’s fancy RTMFP protocol which offers reduced latency and an acoustic echo canceler (yay!). No code changes are required to use the new stack. Just switch to v0.4 and load the Flash audio plugin to reap the benefits. Check it out for yourself.

Also worth mentioning, Phono Mobile was updated to support PhoneGap 1.7 along with some fixes to minor stability issues reported on iOS and Android devices.

This is the by far our best and most stable release to date so don’t just sit there; grab the new release and build something amazing.

A note on WebRTC: Many have asked when to expect an official WebRTC plugin. WebRTC is still a moving target so bear with us (and the rest of the standards community) as we sort things out. That said, I can confirm that the next Phono release will be so significant that it may just propel the project forward to 1.0. Stay tuned and happy coding.

]]>Uncategorizedhttp://blog.phono.com/2012/07/19/release-phono04/Phono WebRTC Previewhttp://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/lTxj6NAvsHc/
Google recently released nearly $70M worth of opensource code to the world, in order to help improve real-time communications (RTC) over the Internet; they call it WebRTC. &#8220;WebRTC is a free, open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs. Their mission is to enable rich, high quality, RTC [&#8230;]http://blog.phono.com/?p=575Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:27:42 +0000Google recently released nearly $70M worth of opensource code to the world, in order to help improve real-time communications (RTC) over the Internet; they call it WebRTC.

“WebRTC is a free, open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs. Their mission is to enable rich, high quality, RTC applications to be developed in the browser via simple Javascript APIs and HTML5.”

Interestingly enough, we at Voxeo Labs have a complimentary mission for Phono: to provide a simple Javascript Communications API that empowers developers with the ability to build robust voice and messaging communications apps; these apps can run in any web browser and on any mobile device.

Today we are proud to preview our experimental WebRTC support for the PhonoSDK. Since WebRTC is so new, it only runs in Google’s Chrome Canary experimental browser. The video below demonstrates an encrypted Phono-to-Phono – voice and video – P2P WebRTC experience in a Canary browser and we hope you’re impressed with what you see.

Note: there are a couple of additional videos on the page that demonstrate what else we are doing with Phono and WebRTC!

But wait, there’s more! We made history this week by placing the first public switched telephone network (PSTN) calls to and from real telephones and the Chrome Canary web browser! This video demonstrates a real phone call from an iPhone to our WebRTC-powered Phono Kitchen Sink demo.

But wait, there’s even more! Just in case the previous two videos weren’t geeky enough for you, we wanted to demonstrate a real Phono WebRTC phone call in the web browser without even involving a telco service provider! This test was achieved by using our portable wireless cell tower built on OpenBTS along with a standard Nokia mobile phone. Check this out:

Hopefully we have your attention! We believe that Phono will do for WebRTC what jQuery did for HTML and CSS. Be prepared to see our Phono WebRTC voice and video technology continue to advance, along with our Tropo and PRISM platforms running Rayo, our real-time communications protocol. There are sure to be incompatibilities in early versions of WebRTC. Phono provides a consistent API that works the same on every browser and device

We will be attending Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona, February 27th – March 1st. Please stop by our hospitality suite (Vincci Arena Hotel. Condal Mar Room-1st floor) for live demos of the Voxeo Labs WebRTC technology!

Also stay tuned for a release date of our new PhonoSDK WebRTC!

]]>http://blog.phono.com/2012/02/24/phono-webrtc-preview/Phono Mobile How-To Demohttp://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/BNADfzwfqd4/
Tim Panton, one of the Senior Developers on our Phono project at Voxeo Labs, has prepared a how-to video to demonstrate building a mobile voice conferencing application on iOS. In this video, Tim uses PhonoSDK 0.3, PhonoGap 1.1, and XCode. If you are not familiar with our Phono Mobile SDK, it is an extension of [&#8230;]http://blog.phono.com/?p=562Mon, 19 Dec 2011 22:24:57 +0000Tim Panton, one of the Senior Developers on our Phono project at Voxeo Labs, has prepared a how-to video to demonstrate building a mobile voice conferencing application on iOS. In this video, Tim uses PhonoSDK 0.3, PhonoGap 1.1, and XCode.

If you are not familiar with our Phono Mobile SDK, it is an extension of Phono that lets you run your existing browser-based PhonoSDK applications on iOS and Android devices as native applications using the PhoneGap mobile platform.

]]>http://blog.phono.com/2011/12/19/phono-mobile-how-to-demo/PhonoSDK Java Applethttp://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/7C9t1CylfJk/
Phono Version 0.3 now supports Java Applets in addition to Flash! Our Java Applet has even lower latency on VoIP calls which is perfect for enterprise call centers or controlled environments that want HD audio / Wideband call performance with very low latency measured in milliseconds. Note: For most consumer-facing sites, we still recommend using Flash [&#8230;]http://blog.phono.com/?p=548Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:00:34 +0000Phono Version 0.3 now supports Java Applets in addition to Flash! Our Java Applet has even lower latency on VoIP calls which is perfect for enterprise call centers or controlled environments that want HD audio / Wideband call performance with very low latency measured in milliseconds.

Note: For most consumer-facing sites, we still recommend using Flash due to its more pervasive deployment base.

If you would prefer to use our Java Applet on the desktop, we have provided a new audio property on Phono and a Java Applet availability detector. It sets the desired audio client to engage on the web browser or mobile device. Valid options include: auto, flash, java, and none. This property is optional and is defaulted to auto which means:

if on desktop, flash

if on android, android

if on ios, ios

We have provided a handy Java detection utility that can used like so. Note: If Java is not detected, Phono will fallback to Flash.

Note: If you are running MacOS Lion, you may need to follow these instructions for getting Java applets to automatically load in your web browser.

]]>http://blog.phono.com/2011/12/13/phonosdk-java-applet/VoxeoLabs Releases PhonoSDK Version 0.3http://feeds.voxeo.com/~r/AllVoxeoBlogs/~3/Sj4WI0DnSU8/
PhonoSDK version 0.1 was released in October 2010 at the jQuery Conference in Boston. In March of 2011, PhonoSDK version 0.2 was released with support for better echo suppression so that headphones were no longer necessary. In July 2011 we released Phono Mobile allowing web developers to build and deploy native iOS and Android apps [&#8230;]http://blog.phono.com/?p=532Mon, 12 Dec 2011 22:25:36 +0000PhonoSDK version 0.1 was released in October 2010 at the jQuery Conference in Boston. In March of 2011, PhonoSDK version 0.2 was released with support for better echo suppression so that headphones were no longer necessary. In July 2011 we released Phono Mobile allowing web developers to build and deploy native iOS and Android apps based on PhonoSDK.

Today Voxeo Labs is releasing PhonoSDK version 0.3! This is a major step forward in our commitment this opensource JavaScript Phone API project. Here is a list of new features supported in version 0.3:

Java Applet version of Phono is now included in the SDK! This version has even lower latency than our current Flash-based version of the SDK making this solution perfect for enterprise call centers and companies/individuals who prefer to use Java applets over Flash.

HTTPS support for secured signaling on the network.

HD Audio (wideband) support for Phono-to-Phono and Phono-to-SIP clients and SIP-to-Phono connections for VoIP calling.

Improved latency with updated Flash version of PhonoSDK.

Phono Mobile support for PhoneGap 1.1 (with support for 1.2 coming shortly).

Upgrading from PhonoSDK 0.2 to 0.3 is easy. Simply change 0.2 to 0.3 in your jquery.phono.js URL path like this: